Humans since ages have been wanderers in search of better life.We Bangalore ASCENDers are a group of sober trekkers who have urban settlements but wander in search of wilderness and in the process are not averse to conquer heights. This amalgamation of wilderness and heights makes the journey all the more interesting and adventurous.Come be a part of these adventures and stimulate your wild instincts.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Posted by
Sandeep Kulkarni
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Monday, January 27, 2014
5:12 PM
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Day 0 (24 Jan 2014) - 9 50 pm to 7 AM

Having registered for the event, pretty early, I eagerly waited for the day to come. 24 January 2014 was the day, and I was rearing to go. This was a photography event, but photography was second on my mind, I was more interested travelling out of town, visiting a new place, adding some more memorable moments. And indeed it turned out better than what I anticipated. Apart from the quality time, which I spent, whole event turned out with lots of surprises, which in the end left me with only one option, to write a bigger blog post.

I came to Shantala silks at around 9 50 pm, and was waiting for the vehicle to arrive. Once the cab arrived people started boarding the cab and I went back to put the luggage inside the boot which was big, (enough to hold 15+ full size backpacks). When I boarded the cab I occupied the last seat, where I met Jawahar. I spoke to him for a while and soon (even before Jalahalli cross) he was off to sleep. I was joined by Pramod at Jalahalli cross. I spoke to him about our usual IT stuffs and soon spoke with Vasanth too, who was sitting in the last but one seat, to my front.

I too was dozed off to sleep only to be woken up by some pot holes along the NH 13. We were not being tossed up in the last seat, but it was not so comfortable either. Luckily I managed to catch some sleep and wake up only after reaching Hospet, where we were kind of doing circles, trying to find the shortest route to Kamalapura. In Hospet, one thing I noticed was the sizable number of people who were engaged in morning walks. That came as a surprise to me, (and I guess even to Dr Harish too who told me, about it later), who was expecting a sleepy town.

Day 1 (25 Jan 2014) - 7:20 AM to 9 30 AM

We reached Kamalapura around 7:20 am, and we made our way to the Mayura KSTDC guest house. The accommodation had quite a huge campus. It was at a distance from the main road, hence, ensuring lots of parking space, lots of space to roam around, and very less noise. It also guaranteed a nice place for camp fire. Did we carry any wood for camp fire? More about it shortly. There were two dormitories which were made available for us, and soon people starting getting freshened up. Till I got a turn to get freshened up, Vinay, Dr Harish, Harsha and me, went out to Kamalapura, to get some much needed stuffs.

At around 9 30 am odd, once everyone was ready, we started from the KSTDC guest house towards the LOST CITY of Hampi. It felt good, really good, to be back after so many years. We had to have our breakfast, before that, Vinay, Dr Harish and Ram or Sumant (not sure who) got down and paid a visit to the Information Officer at Kamalapura, to fix our Itinerary so that we could make most out of the two days. Finally around 15 minutes later all of them were back. We were also in luck as the Information Officer also got us hooked up our guide for the next two days, Satish, who would be waiting for us at the Virupaksha temple.

Then we headed out to a nearby hotel which seemed to be nice as told by the Officer earlier. It was good, but it turned out to be too slow and we lost some time and it impacted us and we ended up not making it to the Sunset point on Mathunga Hill on Day 1. More on that later. Also in the KSTDC accommodation we had lots of other people, infact a whole group of architecture students from Delhi. ( Got this info from the Officer, who told he himself would have accompanied us, in case he was not occupied with this group). But none the less, our guide packed an equal punch. (who also belted out some emotional, appreciative lines towards end of day 2, while we were about to depart to Bangalore).

Day 1 (25 Jan 2014) - 10 45 AM to 2 PM

We met our guide Satish and proceeded towards Virupaksha temple. Virupaksha temple is the oldest and the principal temple in Hampi. Virupaksha is a form of Shiva. On the way we could see a huge shuttered structure, most likely the chariot, we could see the Hampi market. As we enter we can find a 3 headed Basavanna to our left. Also very close to the entrance we could see an inscription of Varaha. Our guide Satish told us that, this has been inscribed so that, enemies / invaders would retreat on the sight of this. We saw such an inscription on couple of other temples too. We entered into the temple, and completed the Darshan. The guide showed us few paintings which were present on the ceiling and he also explained to us the significance of few of them. There are also shrines of Goddess Pampa and Bhuvaneshwari. We went there too. Also there were couple of places within the temple premises very close to the shrines where our guide could show us the natural camera. The inverted shadow of the temple Gopura is very very clearly visible in natural light through a small opening in the wall.

It was another exciting Friday evening and I was all set for an exploratory trek with BASC. With the overwhelming sense of exploration spinning inside my head, I started my experiment to try some new route, right after I left home for our first meeting point Shantala Silk, Majestic. I chose a wrong route and then I was very sure of being the last one to reach the assembly point :D. Felt great to meet some known trekking mates and some new faces with lots of cheers and energy. Few more pickups on the way and we started heading towards the 'mystic’ exploratory trek to lesser known waterfalls of Western Ghats!Ravi, our captain, pulled the trigger for introduction round, which I feel is always one of the funniest moments of any trek. Slowly we all started getting into the comfort zone, with many experiences shared by fellow trekkers and adventurers. Those heavy duty laughter and ragging was ruling the atmosphere gradually and conditioning our minds for more and more fun ahead for two days in the wild!

Monday, January 20, 2014

So, finally I got to meet Bangalore Ascenders! It was so exciting to see my name get shortlisted. Thanks a lot to Rajesh for expanding the team size and accommodating all of us :) I started rehearsing for the trek as the day drew closer, thinking about the things to carry, people I'm going to meet, how to introduce myself and how to get over the initial nervous feeling and start socializing!

The day of Saturday, 18th Jan 2014, we were off for a night trek to Makalidurga hilltop Shiva temple, lead by Major Rajesh :) The schedule was to assemble in Majestic railway station at 5.30 pm and take the Hindupur bound train at 6.00. I had planned to start from home in Bommanahalli at 3.30 but as usual, got delayed and started at 4.15. I had considering to take my bike but was not sure of the overnight parking facility in Majestic railway station and how safe it was. So decided on taking a bus. But I hadn't anticipated the route the bus would took - via Shanthi nagar and Double road, looked like a round about way and with inching traffic on a Saturday evening in Bangalore, I barely managed to reach Platform no.8 (Thanks to the SMS from Rajesh) at 5.55 after one hour-and-a-half long journey counting every minute :|

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Posted by
Jithendra B N
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Sunday, January 19, 2014
2:06 PM
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Well I am not much of a writer but just I have shared the thoughts and the journey from my end so that we can look at it after days and remember the time we spent together.

Night trek to Bramhagiri was conducted by Bangalore ASCENDers(BASC) on 18th January 2014. The moment we all met up in Platform-9 it was one heck of a journey. To start of with, we were in wrong platform with no idea of which train to climb into until BKS called up asked. That’s when we realized we are in wrong platform & ran to platform 8 and got into train. Subratho was supposed to enter in a DDLJ style but could not make it, probably he was not as fast of Kajol, but jokes apart, sorry that he missed it.

We took out attendance and some informal introductions in the train. The moment we started with dumb charades is when it lit up more. We were so involved that we would have missed the Nandi stop if it was not for Mudassar (of-course he was the organizer). Got down and went on with formal undertaking and introduction while Mudassar was negotiating with Auto. After a long 4 kms auto (since I was in back seat & Jyothsna was continuously saying she was hungry) we finally got down at our trek's starting point. Packed food at nearest cafe and told the owner to be ready with next day's breakfast. By almost 9 we started ascending just when the moon started giving us its light to carry further.

We trekked for almost an hour and half and came to dinner point where we had some nice view of the city and airport. We took photos, had moon light dinner and some more photos before we continue our trek. With my obsession of being in front of the group, I carried on with Mudassar and Preetham. We took wrong right turns searching for the temple; after 5 wrong turns we reached the temple by around 11PM. We explored the surroundings and gathered wood for campfire. After cutting birthday cake we started with individual trek stories, BASC blood camp initiatives and others. After all the fun we tried sleeping for few hours by around 2.30AM. When I opened my eyes at 4.15AM all I can see is a human standing next to door seeing out, got scared. It was Mr. George who apparently could not sleep. Eventually everyone got up and it was cold!! We went for fire and thankfully it was still burning. We spent the next one hours constantly struggling to burn the damp wood and finding that warm air from the fire.

By almost 5.30am we took the stairs for peak and found that it’s even more cold and windy. We all snuggled up behind a rock to avoid the wind where I listened to iPod. It was one of the most amazing moments of this trek. We took group photos and fooled around a bit till 6.30am but sun was still not up. Also thanks to Surabhi's impeccable mobile network service that we confirmed that there are no train back on Sunday. Then we decided it’s time for us to head back, started descending half way through we saw the sun rise, started picking up whatever trash we can find (thanks Preetham for this), lost our way badly and lost track of other half team. Finally everyone grouped up reached the cafe and probably did more business to that cafe owner than any single day of his life. We took the bus back to Bangalore and this is where I had the best one hour sleep of my life.

Now thinking back thanks to Mudassar for arranging it so nicely without any hiccups and all of you who made it as one of the most memorable trek for me.

Written by: Akash

Post- 2

Here comes the first trek of the year. From the very start the plan was a roller coaster ride. I persuaded my friends (Tiwari and Piyush) to come for a BASC trek and I ended up not making to the list. Later the wait list got cleared and we went for the trek.

As opposed to previous experiences, this time I went from train. We all assembled at platform 9 at around 5:30 PM and suddenly got the news that this is the wrong platform. We rushed to platform 8 and boarded the train. We had great rounds of dumb charades on way to base camp. After reaching a small village we reached the base camp from an Auto (two fully packed autos). Our stomach already started asking for food. We packed some food from hotel and had tea & nariyal-pani. We started climbing at around 9PM.

As we were there for a more special purpose celebration of Tiwari's Birthday, I was hoping that we should reach top before 12AM. Apart from frequent chocolate/biscuit breaks we killed our most of the time in getting ourselves by anyone having the camera. Some people got new names on the trek (for instance - Majnu). In between we had a break where we enjoyed fried rice and tomato rice. Surbhi enjoyed it more than anyone else as she liked the curry a little more than others.

We reached the night camping site just in time (@ 11:55PM). Piyush and I quickly started assembling the cake we bought with us. We celebrated the birthday there. It was a very unique experience to me at-least, I hope Tiwari also felt the same. Fortunately, the cake came out well and everyone enjoyed, we also had the camp fire going on. Mudassar and Shrinivas exchanged some BASC programs and Trek stories, which were very interesting. At about 2AM the fire started dying and temperature started dropping. I didn't wanted to sleep as I wanted to make sure that I am up at sunrise. Still we had a small nap in freezing cold.

When I woke I saw George's silhouette at the door right in front of me. We were very happy to see that fire hadn’t died completely so we enjoyed it for some more time. Around 6AM we reached the peak where it was freeze cold. We had to hide behind a rock to avoid the chilly winds. After sometime we had some clicks and then we started descending. While on our way back, we lost track of the correct path which delayed the plan a bit. But overall it was a nice experience.

Written by: Vivek V V

Post - 3

It was a wonderful trek with BASC. Trekking in moonlight has always enthralled me. In short, it's a beautiful memory of playing dumb charades in train with loads of fun, a moonlight dinner over bed of rocks, trekking in the moon-lit trail to the temple, cold windy night, incinerating the remnants of doors and windows from the temple (that we eventually rejoiced as 'Camp fire'), birthday celebration of Ravindra, inspiring/scaring experiences of Mudassar's OG ventures, exploring the camping place with less than 100m visibility etc...

Our struggle to find the way back to the village in the morning mist engulfed us all around, truly added some fun and we ended up doing little exploration in a small over-night trek! It was an icing on the cake.

Thank you guys for making this trek delightful. This will always make me feel exuberant whenever I take a look at that full moon and contemplate about my next moonlight trek to relive every moment! Happy trekking!

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Bangalore ASCENDers is a group of outdoor buffs and nature lovers, freaking out conquering peaks, traversing valleys, crossing crystal clear streams, drenching in rains and camping under bright stars. We engage our weekend’s in trekking, fun outings with special kids, adventure sports, cycling, biking, rock climbing, countryside travelling, wildlife photography and being part of eco-conservation drives and other social initiatives.
We are delighted to inform that this is a non-profit group and is solely carried by the efforts of the organizing team and the volunteers. Read More >>